The first time I went to Uganda was in September, 2001 with Donna. We had been married just over a year and were determined to see a bit of the world before starting a family. We traveled with my parents who had just started their non-profit, Computers for Africa. During our stay, we visited schools and helped set up computer labs in Masaka, Uganda and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

We returned to the country last year, this time with our two daughters, determined to show them a little more of the world. My parents and their good friend Herbert helped plan an itinerary that took us on a grand, counter-clockwise tour around the country. We visited schools, met with people in their homes, and visited the local sites: the source of the Nile, the equator, Sipi Falls, and the game park at Murchison Falls.

The countryside was beautiful, the animals abundant, and the people were very friendly and welcoming. But despite all the beauty and wonders all around us, we couldn't help but get in a few games:

We introduced the sisters at Kalungu Girls’ Training Centre in Masaka to Catan in 2001.

We played a few games of Carcassonne on a ferry ride to Zanzibar on that trip.

And last year, we tested Mole Rats in Space (in prototype form) with our guide Herbert and the girls while traveling in Gulu – appropriate, since Mole Rats are indigenous to East Africa.

Slim pickings: Twister and Cat & Mouse make up the total games available at this department store we visited.

Aside from the games we brought with us, however, modern boardgames are nowhere to be found in Uganda.

That’s why I was so surprised to learn that there was a board game convention being held in Uganda last May – in Gulu – where we had just visited! And it wasn’t just chess, checkers, and mancala – these kids were playing games like Codenames Pictures, Cosmic Encounter, RoboRally, and Legends of Andor!

The convention was sponsored by Chrysalis, which has been training children to be change makers and social entrepreneurs for the last seven years. They’ve been using modern boardgames to train kids “in a whole range of skills, from social to persuasion, planning to resource management, adaptability to tactics, and much more.” They note that the games help the kids with self confidence, their ability to learn, and provide creative influence and inspiration.

Their first convention was a big success. Now they are working to expand their program into a new initiative called Gamechangers. Gamechangers will create more opportunities for children to play games between conventions and will focus on the following areas:

Competitive and cooperative boardgames

Drama, to teach the value of boardgames

Art arena cooperation games

Active and team-building games

Story-collecting for new games and adventures

They’re actively raising funds for this new program and could use your help. You can read all about how they’l be using the funds to train 16 young change makers to become social entrepreneurs on their Crowdfunder page: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/gamechangers

If you do pledge, leave a comment below and let me know, because on Tuesday, August 15th at 12:00 noon PDT, I’ll randomly select one of the commenters who has made a donation to the program (however large) and send them a personalized care package. It might include…

a new, never-before seen prototype role card for Pandemic with your name on it

or a game

or a lenticular Forbidden Island postcard

or a special, hand-made “Box 9” for Pandemic Legacy Season 2 that only YOU will ever know the contents of

or all of the above … who knows?

Whatever it is, it’ll be a surprise and I’ll ship it anywhere in the world if you win.

Special thanks to Tony Boydell for this raffle idea that I’m brazenly stealing.

Update: We have a winner

Congratulations to Kurt Wils! You're the winner of the care package above. Please contact me at mleacock@mac.com to work out all the details.

Thanks to everyone who contributed! We blew away their initial goal and their stretch goal. As of this writing, they've raised £2,907!

The campaign wraps on 18 August 2017 if you've just arrived and would like to make a contribution.

Here are the game design resources that I've personally found most useful in my new day job. (Now I know where to go when I need to re-order something!)

Bits and Prototyping Materials

I buy nearly all my wooden bits from spielmaterial.de. They're a bit expensive and shipping from Germany takes awhile, but their selection and quality is hard to beat. They're my go-to for standard Euro-game fare: wooden cubes, pawns, meeples, and disks, among other things.

I buy more cribbage pegs than I ever thought reasonable from Casey's Wood Products. They also carry the usual craft line of unpainted blocks, beads, balls, eggs, golf tees, checkers, and so on. I picked up the buttons and spools for the Knit Wit prototypes from them.

After many years of experimentation I've found that card sleeves work the best for me for card prototyping purposes. I can print on regular paper stock, letting me iterate quickly. Plus, the sleeves come in a variety of colors and (perhaps most importantly) they're reusable. I've been buying UltraPro sleeves at full retail price – if anyone has a good source for sleeves in bulk, let me know in the comments.

For 3D components, I do a lot of rough prototyping in craft foam. Read more about this magical prototyping material in my article, Craft Foam: the Poor Man's 3D Printer. I've been doing a lot of laser cutting lately, but still find that sticker paper + craft foam makes a fast, cheap, first pass.

I find inkjet-friendly sticker paper indispensable and buy it in bulk from Label Outfitters. It's not as opaque as the nicer Avery version, but it's a lot cheaper. The letter-sized sheets can be had for less than 10 cents a sheet in bulk. Sticker sheets let you "print" on essentially anything whether it's foam, chipboard, wooden bits, dice, or your prototype box.

Books

Of all the books on game design that I've read, the one that I found most useful is The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell. The author approaches the craft through 100 different "lenses" or perspectives. These lenses are also available in a card format that I highly recommend.

Raph Koster's A Theory of Fun thoughtfully explores where the fun in games comes from. Koster embellishes nearly every spread with playful illustrations that help communicate his points.

Rules of Play by Katie Salen Tekinbaş and Eric Zimmerman is the textbook of game design and reads as one. This book is chock full of definitions and dry descriptions of the many elements involved in game design. While I found it interesting academically, I didn't find much in it that I could apply directly to my process.

One of the best ways to increase engagement in your game is to find ways to modulate your players emotions. This concept is explored in depth via "beat analysis" in Robin Laws' book, Hamlet's Hit Points. Laws describes a vocabulary of up and down beats, describes how they can be used for better storytelling and role playing, and deconstructs three stories using them to get you fully acquainted with the vocabulary.

Software

I use a pretty lean software kit these days and can do nearly everything I need to accomplish with Adobe Illustrator (prototype illustration), Google Drive (journaling, data tracking, playtest logs, punch lists, file sharing). Illustrator's a pain-in-the ass to learn and use, but after nearly (gulp) 30 years of use, I find it indispensible.

I use Skype and Sococo for communication, avoiding email as much as possible for sharing information that exceeds more than a few sentences. I favor Drive (for asynchronous stuff) since it synchronizes with other contributors and offers full history, and Sococo (for realtime communications) since it offers voice, video, chat, screen sharing and rich presence info.

Tools

I burned through a bunch of low-grade paper cutters before finding the Dahle 507 Personal Rolling Trimmer. If you need accuracy, it'll split a .5pt line (if you're cutting one page at a time). If not, you can cut up to about 8 pages of 20lb. stock in one go. Do yourself a favor and get a great cutter.

Blogs and Podcasts

I'm not an avid podcast listener or player of roleplaying games, but if I were, I'd be devoted to Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff. As it is, I pop in occasionally and always leave impressed with how literate, articulate, and just plain smart the hosts are about story construction and a whole host of other topics often tangentially related to board game design.

And if you're not following Board Game News on BoardGameGeek, you're missing out on what's happening on the scene. W. Eric Martin's been on the beat for years now and really knows the industry and the players.

Am I missing out on something truly great here? Let me know in the comments.

The recent launch of the Chariot Race Kickstarter got me thinking about all the iterations the game has gone through. The earliest sketches I found were dated 2 October 2010, over six years before the game was released.

I typically keep older versions of a game as I work. Doing so helps me design in a more fearless manner – I can try stupid things knowing I can roll back if needed. I also take comfort when I look at these things before I start a new project, because they remind me that games don't start out pretty or balanced.

Chariot Race started as a pub game with wooden boards and pegs. Watch here as the number of spaces on the board gradually shrinks and the chariot boards take on all sorts of different forms:

This is one of the "wood" prototypes (made from foam) alongside the board game version. Moving to more traditional materials cut the game's cost by more than half and opened up the possibility of including a double-sided board and variable chariots. The wood was fun but terribly expensive and the chariots (as cribbage pegs) weren't very thematic.

Here are some of the many pegboards I made out of foam and drilled for testing. Some of the boards were hollowed out underneath so you could keep your Fortuna coins secret from the other players. I used older boards to hold cribbage pegs while I painted them (bottom right). Not pictured are all the sets I sent out for blind-testing. I must have drilled about 5,000 holes over the course of the project.

Here are the reverse sides of the chariot boards showing the six different configurations. Chariots are either sturdy, normal, or flimsy; horses are either speedy, normal, or slow; and charioteers are either lucky, normal, or unlucky.

Roll Through the Ages: The Bronze Age saw even more iteration. Watch here as the list of developments gradually expands while I continued to experiment with the size and format of the score sheet:

One of the central tensions I needed to resolve in this game was how much information to communicate on the score sheet. I was strongly tempted to go with a minimalist design (so new players wouldn't be scared off by all the text) but it turned out the new players appreciated the reference information most of all. (The last frame here, "LBA," refers to The Late Bronze Age, a print-and-play expansion for the game.)

People often attribute the success of a product to the novelty of its underlying idea. The truth is, the idea (while clear in hindsight) is often only dimly visible when you start out and dozens of iterations are often required before you're able to clear away the fog and arrive at the "obvious" solution.

If you're designing a game of your own, keep this in mind. You'll rarely get it close to right the first time. Much of the quality of a good game comes from its execution – all the little details matter – and the best way to get those right is through continuous iteration.

There are so many stories to tell from Uganda that it’s hard to know where to start. There are stories of nightmarish traffic in Kampala, the unimaginably large things you see people carry on boda-bodas (the ubiquitous motorcycles for hire that fill the streets), on their bicycles, or on their heads for that matter. We have stories about visiting the people and learning what life is like in the countryside and what it was like not-so-very-long-ago in the war-torn North. There are gripping tales of adventure, like the time I accidentally shut a baboon in the van with my mother and the making of our first batch of bush coffee. For this first post, however, you’ll all just have to settle for something more mundane: an activity that lets you pretend you're in Uganda by letting you design your own room for the night.

Our route. Click the map for a larger view.1. Landed in Entebbe2. Traffic and shopping in Kampala3. Quick stop to buy drums and do "experiments" at the equator4. Visited schools and a family in Masaka5. Boat ride to the source of the Nile at Jinja6. New brakes for the van in Mbale7. Hiked up Sipi Falls8. Visited schools in Lira9. Visited schools and a family in Gulu10. Boat ride on the Nile, photo safari, and Murchison Falls hike11, 12. Back to Kampala and Entebbe

During our earlier trip to Uganda (in 2001), the running joke was that you got to choose two each day: water, electricity, or internet. Things have really changed in the last 15 years. During our most recent stay last June, we could almost take power and internet for granted. In fact, I was surprised that I had 2G and 3G connectivity across the entire country, with only a few exceptions. For example, it was hard to get a good signal while hiking near Murchison Falls – but such a thing is not out of the ordinary in national parks in the the U.S. And power, once subject to frequent blackouts, has stabilized due to new hydroelectric facilities coming online in 2015. We only stayed at one place that ran on a generator.

That said, we never really knew what we were going to get each night and guessing what kind of accommodations were in store for us became a kind of game. I think we all started a mental tally of those things we appreciated most about a place to avoid pining for our coddled lifestyles.

And since I'm a game maker, I thought I should give you the chance to play this game too!

Build your perfect room in Uganda!

Make a selection from each section.You have 25 points to spend.

Beds

Your room has a comfortable mattress. (12 points)

Your room has a mattress, but the slats are prone to slippage and may deposit you on the floor. (8 points)

The mattress is the equivalent of the Sarlacc Pit. There is a real danger that you and your partner may never escape the pit in the middle. (no extra charge)

Mosquito Nets

The mosquito net is free of holes and extends to the floor (5 points)

The mosquito net tucks under the mattress and gives you that secure “shrink-wrapped” feeling (3 points)

Sure, there are a few holes in the net. It’s nothing a little masking tape and a dozen clothespins won’t fix (no extra charge)

The bathroom from one of the classier places that we stayed at. The door didn't close, but we had hot water! (While we had water, anyway. It cut off while Colleen was in the shower, covered with conditioner.)

Toilets

Hey, there’s a toilet! (5 points)

Toilet includes toilet paper. (+3 points)

Toilet includes a toilet seat. (+1 point)

Toilet uses 50 gallons of water per flush. Somehow, all this water accomplishes nothing. (no extra charge)

Fan

A working fan blows gentle breezes (10 points), but see electricity above.

There is no fan (1 point)

The broken fan in the corner mocks you (no extra charge)

My Selections

So, what would I choose? I'd put everything I could into the mattress and add in some sort of working plumbing. If there are some eggs and coffee, it’s all good. Here are my selections:

Room has a comfortable mattress (12 points)

Nothing a little tape and clothespins won’t fix (no extra charge)

Hey, there’s a toilet! (5 points) with toilet paper (+3 points)

I’ll take water for the shower (5 points)

No need for a mirror or night-time electricity, and I’ll use that broken fan as a drying rack.

I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to turn this into some sort of board game with drafting and/or worker-placement. Rough drafts on my desk by Monday morning, please.

Before you get the idea that I'm just an entitled westerner, complaining about my crappy accommodations, let me assure you, that's not my intention. One thing I enjoyed about the trip was how it forced us to look at the things we took for granted each day through new eyes and better appreciate them.

Uganda was a great adventure; I'll remember the friendly people and the landscapes most of all. I can't recommend it to everyone (they have laws on the books that are infuriating, for example). Like fish that can't see the water all around since it's always there, traveling there – even for a couple of weeks – helped paint a picture of what it takes for people to live together in a way that's harder to grasp when you travel in a developed country. The people are struggling (there's 60%+ unemployment and about 80%+ youth unemployment) but we were able to see real improvements being made all around us, slowly by slowly.

I designed Knit Wit in the spring of 2015. Originally entitled "Venntangled" and played on a whiteboard, after several iterations, the game evolved and picked up its "knitting" theme. You can check out an interview I did for Z-man games along with a few snapshots from playtest sessions below.

Here's an interview I did with Z-man on the design of Knit Wit. The last few frames show the how the prototype I initially sent morphed into the final product.

Playtesting with the Rory O'Connor, Anita Murphy, and their family. Theses people are brilliant; if you haven't seen their Story Cubes or Extraordinaires Design Studio products, be sure to check them out.

At one point, players each had their own "personal" spool. The concept was later dropped since it didn't add much but additional time to the game. It also added a lot of visual complexity as you can see here!

Another prototype. I made the spools here out of some extra wooden disks and double-sided tape.

A special thanks goes out to Max Brace for the "Knit Wit" name. I think we tried out dozens before he quietly suggested the name after a few moments of thought and it fit the game perfectly.

So many games! Here is some information on titles that have been announced for 2016. Keep an eye on this space; there's more to come.

Knit Wit

Craft your own word categories using loops and spools then find playful answers that match as many categories as possible. The more categories you match, the more points you score!

a social game for 2-8 players, 15 minutesRelease Date: March 2016Publisher: Z-man GamesMore info on Knit Wit

Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu

Beings of ancient evil, known as Old Ones, are threatening to break out of their cosmic prison and awake into the world. Everything you know and love could be destroyed by chaos and madness. Can you and your fellow investigators manage to find and seal every portal in time? Hurry before you lose yourself to insanity.

Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu was designed by Chuck D. Yager and based on Pandemic. It’s a new, standalone game (and not just a re-skin). I helped a bit with development.

Thunderbirds: The Hood

One player takes on the role of The Hood in this expansion to Thunderbirds - The Co-operative Game. Craft a diabolical scheme and attempt to photograph—or even hijack!—the Thunderbirds machines. Comes with a Hood peg, Hood's Lair, Hood's Sub, and Hood's Plane figures, Agent figures, scheme tokens, camera, and everything else you need to play. Also can be used to turn Thunderbirds into a 2-player competitive game.

an expansion for Thunderbirds for 2-5 players, 45 to 60 minutesRelease Date: Spiel in October 2016Publisher: Modiphius Entertainment

In a recent Atlas Obscura article, reporter Sarah Laskow wanted to better understand the landscape of board games and how cooperative games played into the scene. I'd done some research into that very topic for a talk that I gave at LinkedIn and shared the numbers I found with her. I'd dug into the subject because it had seemed to me that coop games were popping up everywhere. I wanted to know if this was a real phenomenon or if I’d just become sensitized to it—was this the blue car effect or were coop games now a thing?

My method was fairly straightforward: I did a search for all of the products listed by year with a “co-operative play” mechanism. I found the numbers were fairly consistent year over year until about 2000. This shouldn’t surprise many—that’s when the Geek first went online and also coincides roughly when the hobby really started to pick up momentum. In order to control for the phenomenal growth of the hobby, I had to control for the total number of products per year. The admins at the Geek were kind enough to modify their search feature (at the time, it capped out after a set number of pages) so I could get a rough tally.

Here’s the number of products featuring “cooperative play” mechanism each year:

Here’s the total number of products listed each year in the Geek. This is rounded to the nearest 50 (I took the shortcut of counting pages of search results, not individual products).

Total number of board game related products in the Board Game Geek database. (Source: BoardGameGeek.com)

Dividing the two gives the percentage of products featuring cooperative play. It’s no imagined effect—something changed in 2009. Prior to the release of Pandemic, products with a cooperative play element accounted for 2 to 4% of the total. The style of play has been growing ever since. In 2015 the style appeared in roughly 12% of all the listed products.

Keep in mind this is only compares the number of titles with this play style—it’s not a comparison of total sales. I’d expect that coops would still be dwarfed by strictly competitive games. But it does show that willingness of designers and publishers to create games with this style of play has grown significantly since 2009.

I’d be interested to see how other trends have come and gone over time. How have worker placement games fared over time? Roll-and-move games? Deck builders? … Legacy games? (I suspect that would be a small chart!) If any of you have the time to make such a graph, I for one, would love to see it.

My daughters gave me a new sketchbook for my birthday, which got me thinking about how I use these things. Here are a few thoughts that occurred to me as I flipped through my most recent book:

I rarely reference old drawings when I'm designing something new. There were some pages in this book I hardly recognized.

Sometimes I find myself believing that every game that I designed before my current game came easily. If these old books are useful for anything, it's to remind me how untrue that is. I love finding old dead-ends. It's reassuring.

In his excellent book, Sketching User Experiences, Bill Buxton compares sketching to having a conversation with yourself. I find this to be true. I rarely care about the drawings themselves—it's the act of drawing and responding to what you see that's important.

With that, here's a few snapshots from my last sketchbook. Most of these are of Pandemic: The Cure and Thunderbirds. Other drawings will have to wait until the games they accompany are released. All of these contain a self-portrait of me in the form of a shadow. Sorry about that—I've got to get a better photo rig.

One of the first sketches of the Thunderbirds board. The vertical line indicates the decision to cut the board in half at the Atlantic so Tracy Island can be in the center.

The Hood had his very own region of the world in this version. Handy!

I know enough about probability to be dangerous. Here's where I started to plot out the difficulty numbers for the various rescue missions in the Thunderbirds game.

Apparently 7s and 9s are "lame," while 8, 10, 11, and 12 are "good." I think this has \to do with whether the associated bonuses present a meaningful decision to the player.

I don't know what the note, "(Rob) Hope is lost." refers to, but it's probably something I needed to communicate to Rob Harris, not Rob Daviau since this is for Thunderbirds.

Notes from a playtest of Pandemic: The Cure

Early player dice from Pandemic: The Cure.

An early treatment center from Pandemic: The Cure. On the right you can see that I was playing with the idea that the different diseases could be increasingly hard to cure.

Who can resist the Thunderbirds machines? Certainly not me. Also: If it's not clear by now, if I can work cribbage pegs into a game, I will.

Notes on story done in preparation for Pandemic Legacy.

I'm curious—do you have a favorite way of sketching? Or do you jump right into prototype creation? Or (heaven forbid) on to the computer?

3D printers are all the rage these days, and it's all I can do to keep myself from picking one up. The trouble is, for most of the design work I typically do, I think I'd just be creating a headache for myself if I did.

Sand tokens from a prototype of Forbidden Desert

I spend a great deal of time prototyping boardgames. One of the things I've learned over the years is that you can't get too invested in the visual design of your prototypes early on or you'll be afraid to iterate on the interaction, for fear of losing your investment. And since I spend the vast majority of my time on the interaction—that's a dangerous proposition. I fear that if I picked up one of these magical devices, I would spend all my time fine-tuning their appearance in 3D software rather than determining if the bits are needed at all.

Island tiles from a prototype of Forbidden Island

Instead, I've come to love craft foam—the stuff you can pick up at craft stores like Michael's. While it's often pre-cut into horrible holiday craft kits, you can also get it in simple rectangles with a layer of wicked-strong, pre-applied adhesive. Craft foam is light (which makes it cheap to mail), cuts like butter with a sharp x-acto knife, drills easily, and comes in a thickness that is both easy and pleasant to pick up off the table. If you've ever suffered the frustration of trying to pick up thin card stock components, you know how important this can be.

Bits and pieces from dozens of iterations of the Thunderbirds board game

Chris Birch of Modiphius has agreed to try out a little experiment for the Thunderbirds kickstarter with me. Since we still have a few weeks to polish up the game a bit, we thought we'd lift the veil and share the rules as I edit them in Google Docs and have them open for comment.

Now, mind you, this is the raw text that describes how the game works. It's unvarnished and unillustrated, with diagrams drawn by yours, truly. Michal Cross will be coming in to do his part and make the whole package look fantastic.

I've decided to join the 21st century at last and upgrade my dusty old website. Goodbye tables and spacer gifs! Hello slightly cold, clinical look. Is that the cost of having fashionable UI in 2015? If nothing else, I refuse to put a cover page on this site. And no, you didn't see a popup when you visited. You're welcome.

At least this thing is will be easy to update when I have something to share.

I'll be pointing to a few older pieces of content here to start off, but then hope to be able to share news on upcoming games like Pandemic Legacy and Thunderbirds and other games coming down the pike. And I'm especially looking forward to being able to point people to this site without an obligatory apology.